Ron, to be honest, it was pathetic and only lowered my already mediocre opinion of TV journalism. They could have asked him so many interesting questions about the new DSP strategy, the work on the CDMA chip, etc., but noooo! Also, they kept referring to Wilf as the grand old man of Silicon Valley, which he did not appear to object to. Anyway, it was mostly a trip down memory lane. Wilf told of starting a semi company with $6 million when he really should have had $100 million. He did it by being one of the first fab-less companies, though he did not seem to recommend this route today and stressed that LSI has four manufacturing sites spread over the globe and that the Taiwan earthquake has no effect on LSI's business operations. He said that the nature of system on a chip means that LSI is usually the sole source for a customer so that it was important to be able to shift the manufacturing around if an emergency arose. Bill Griffith suggested that this made LSI less cyclical than its competitors, but Wilf firmly deterred that notion and emphasized that it was always a cyclical business, that the thing was to learn how to manage the cyclicality. Perhaps most of interest in an otherwise boring interview was his suggestion that the old giants might actually be the winners in the new dot.com world, as opposed to the actual dot.coms themselves. He felt that the Intels, Microsofts, and Ciscos would not be displaced but would be the driving forces in the dot.com world. Well, hope that satisfies your curiosity. Larry Ellison's house was pretty neat also, though a wee bit too much of a "theme" for me. It kind of reminded me of Epcot.
Beachbumm |
